sick of symmetry
by Douglas Messerli
Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière
(screenplay), Luis Buñuel (director) Le
Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom
of Liberty) / 1974
Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, his penultimate film, is both horrific and hilarious at the same time. This non-narrative narrative (and it is after all a series of interconnected stories), clearly sums up Buñuel’s dismissal of normative values and his deep embracement of human interactions. His characters in this highly surrealistic but also basically humanist tale are not so much studies of complex human beings but represent the perversity of life, the nonsensical aspects of it, and the ridiculousness of our societal demands to correct it or, worse yet, simply to normalize it.
As
a character comments to himself as he moves about objects on his mantel: “I am
sick of symmetry.” So too are the director and his long-time collaborator, Jean-Claude
Carrière. But yet this film has a kind natural symmetry from scene to scene
that as, Buñuel himself described it, “opens a door,” or, as I would argue,
presents us with numerous opening doors, many of them quite perverse, but in
this film’s imagination telling are all also very funny.
A
young high school boy enters a small rural hotel to have an incestuous sexual
liaison with his aunt. At the last moment she becomes wary, and will not allow
him to touch her even though she clearly is in love with him and is willing to
show him her quite youngish nude body. The eager boy nearly suffocates her with
a pillow in an attempt to make love to her before regaining his senses.
The moment he leaves the room, however, he is lured in by another guest
in the hotel for a late-night drink in his room. There the boy discovers
another good-looking woman, while the same man insists that several monks, also
staying in the hotel, join him. They have been previously playing poker with
holy relics in lieu of money. While they sip their port, the woman slips into
the bathroom to redress herself in a leather skirt and whip in order to perform
the role of a dominatrix, the man soon following her to dress in a pair of
pants open at the back to show his ass, the couple soon after begin performing
their act, while the monks and the young man flee the room.
Yet
we perceive that they are all interconnected, the boy hiding his own incestuous
desires—which he soon consummates upon returning to his aunt’s room—and the
monk’s gambling away the church treasures and who knows what else as they
shuffle back and forth into each other’s rooms.
In
another scene, two young girls are approached on a playground by a man we
perceive to be a pedophile, handing the children several postcards which we can
only imagine contain pornographic images. When the children tell their mother
what has happened and show her the postcards she is shocked by what she sees,
yet allows her daughters to keep the cards, which are later revealed by the
camera to contain nothing more than tourist-like scenes of French villages.
As
critic Gwendolyn Audrey Foster observed:
This is hilarious, yes, but
it also should be noted that it
carefully challenges the
definition of what is considered
prurient and immoral and
who upholds those rules.
We are directly implicated
because of our knee-jerk
reactionary response to the
man and his supposedly
immoral postcards.
In
yet another sequence, a young poet suddenly takes out a gun and shoots several
individuals on a street. Tried for murder, he quickly becomes a hero from whom
everyone demands a photograph, as he is permitted to leave by the judge with
any imprisonment.
In fact, I might suggest that Buñuel’s film, in its structure, is very much like the Menippean Satire—sans the autodidact—of which Petronius’ Satyricon is a major example. Here perhaps the director and co-writer are themselves the pedants telling us what we can’t ourselves otherwise see.
Although some critics have argued that The Phantom of Liberty was a departure from Buñuel’s previous films,
I’d argue, along with Foster, that The
Exterminating Angel and films that followed share a great deal with this
work, presenting people who cannot see their own prejudices and social
stupidities due to their moral blindness.
My
favorite sequence, in fact, concerns just this issue. A seemingly happily
married couple suddenly realize that their young daughter has gone missing,
quickly reporting it to the police. Yet the daughter is there, in the flesh,
with them all along their wailing travails. The chief detective even interviews
her about her own disappearance. The child speaks but her parents and other
authorities simply cannot hear her. The young girl patiently, time and again,
attempts to explain that she hasn’t gone anywhere. But her pleas remain
unheard. Isn’t that precisely how parents often treat children, never bothering
to listen to their own voices and complaints? Given the chaotic world that this
director presents about adults, mightn’t it be to our advantage to listen to
the young. The recent horrific treatment of the 16-year-old Swedish climate
activist Greta Thunberg reiterates these very concerns. If as, Stephen Sondheim
argues in Into the Woods we should be
careful what we say because children “will listen,” perhaps it might be even
more important that we listen to them.
For
Buñuel, himself, this film was a working out of his belief that “Chance governs
all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only
later.”
Given my constant observations of how much coincidence and chance have
played a role in my own life, how could I not love this film.
Los Angeles, October 13, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2019).
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